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Genesis 32:22 – 33:12: That Face: Proper 13A
And so it has come to this. Jacob, the heel-grasper, the schemer, the wheeler and dealer, the sneak, the crook, the lie, the cheat: he’s coming home. Deception and wheedling stand on either side of the last twenty years, like bookends on Jacob’s life. He fled Canaan having deceived his old father, Isaac, and having…
Psalm 119:129-136
Proper 12A
Psalm 119 is something of a poetic wonder in the Jewish-Christian Scriptures. As everyone knows, it’s the longest “chapter” in the entire Bible and by a lot at that. Luke 1 wins the prize for longest chapter in the New Testament, clocking in at 80 verses. Psalm 119 looks at that and says, “Tell you…
Genesis 29:15-28
Proper 12A
Fitting this Story into the Whole At the beginning of chapter 29, Jacob arrives in Paddan-aram. In this text, we see all the ways Laban lords it over Jacob. At the end of chapter 30, Jacob gains the upper hand over Laban and in chapter 31, we see Jacob, along with all his accumulated household…
Psalm 86:11-17
Proper 11A
We do not know for certain if David wrote all of the psalms that are attributed to him (probably not seems to be the consensus of many scholars). The Hebrew phrase “Of David” can mean multiple things. Yes, it can indicate authorship but it could also be “in the style of David” or “in honor…
Genesis 28:10-19a
Proper 11A
Genesis 28 comes on the heels of Jacob stealing his older brother’s birthright or legitimately buying it in trade for a bowl of stew, depending on who is telling the story. What we will see play out in later chapters is, indeed, the younger brother receiving the blessing historically passed down to the first-born. This…
Psalm 65:(1-8), 9-13
Proper 10A
Even after a couple decades writing sermon commentaries on Revised Common Lectionary texts, it remains a mystery to me just what it means when they place some verses inside parentheses. And in the case of Psalm 65 that means just over half of the psalm is so designated. In any event there is very little…
Genesis 25:19-34
Proper 10A
Commentator’s Note: The genius of the latter half of Genesis is the way it tells stories of fascinating characters — interesting to us not primarily because they are foreign or strange but precisely because we see our own families, stories, dramas, traumas and redemptions on display. What I’ve created here is a narrative, created under…
Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67
Proper 9A
Commentator’s Note: The genius of the latter half of Genesis is the way it tells stories of fascinating characters — interesting to us not primarily because they are foreign or strange but precisely because we see our own families, stories, dramas, traumas and redemptions on display. Over the next two weeks, I’ve written a narrative,…
Psalm 145:8-14
Proper 9A
Psalm 145 occurs twice in each of the Revised Common Lectionary’s Years of A, B, and C. But it’s never the whole psalm for some reason. This Year A reading carves out some of the middle of this song while other assigned lections in other years include the first verses, the last verses, the middle…
Genesis 22:1-14
Proper 8A
This is one of the simplest stories in the whole Bible. That may surprise you but it’s true. From the standpoint of Hebrew language — vocabulary, grammar, syntax, that sort of thing — this story is remarkably straight-forward. In fact, for this reason, many beginning Hebrew students are assigned this text for their first translation…
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